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I don’t know for sure, but I’ve never had a project fail for lack of monads or functional purity, but they’ve often failed because I couldn’t figure out the too

I don’t know for sure, but I’ve never had a project fail for lack of monads or functional purity, but they’ve often failed because I couldn’t figure out the tooling quickly enough or there was some critical library missing or the documentation was shit or etc. And the economics of bridges and web apps aren’t comparable (I can’t redeploy a bridge in an hour and no one dies if one of my routes 500s when the user passes unexpected input).

gtycomb 8y ago
I feel the pain as I read your line. One great disaster in my career early on was my going into Haskell, and also Prolog, after frustration with Java (remember Java Beans etc?) in an enterprise project. Whereas Perl5 (this was in the biotech/genomics industry) and later Python did the real work. Still I cannot forget the impressive functional power while coding Ocaml.
tikhonj 8y ago
Projects fail because of bad code quality and architecture all the time. Monads and functional purity are simple tools that help tame and manage these issues. I've seen a number of projects (often in JavaScript or Python) fail because of poor effect management—but if you don't have much experience with functional programming, you'd see it as yet another project failing because of bad development practices or lack of discipline. With experience, it became pretty clear that what we needed were not iron-willed, self-disciplined developers but just better tools, of which effect management (ie monads) and functional programming are some of the most powerful.
- weberc2 8y ago
  This seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but I don't perceive a clear signal that indicates that projects which use monads or pure FP are more successful than their counterparts. I think your hypothesis actually jives with mine and with my observation from the previous sentence--that monads and functional purity could help, but if the language neglects things like documentation, high quality libraries, and tooling to productionise and operationalize your code, then it's a non-starter.

gtycomb 8y ago

I feel the pain as I read your line. One great disaster in my career early on was my going into Haskell, and also Prolog, after frustration with Java (remember Java Beans etc?) in an enterprise project. Whereas Perl5 (this was in the biotech/genomics industry) and later Python did the real work. Still I cannot forget the impressive functional power while coding Ocaml.

tikhonj 8y ago

Projects fail because of bad code quality and architecture all the time. Monads and functional purity are simple tools that help tame and manage these issues. I've seen a number of projects (often in JavaScript or Python) fail because of poor effect management—but if you don't have much experience with functional programming, you'd see it as yet another project failing because of bad development practices or lack of discipline. With experience, it became pretty clear that what we needed were not iron-willed, self-disciplined developers but just better tools, of which effect management (ie monads) and functional programming are some of the most powerful.

weberc2 8y ago
This seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but I don't perceive a clear signal that indicates that projects which use monads or pure FP are more successful than their counterparts. I think your hypothesis actually jives with mine and with my observation from the previous sentence--that monads and functional purity could help, but if the language neglects things like documentation, high quality libraries, and tooling to productionise and operationalize your code, then it's a non-starter.